Join GeekBeacon Fest Now!

Open Letter To The Community

GeekBeacon would like to cordially invite you to join us in our first open culture, open source, festival celebrating making the world a better place through shared knowledge and technology.

In this tenuous time fraught with uncertainty, health concerns, and political strife we find ourselves more isolated and divided than ever. But the Free Libre Open Source Software (FOSS) ideals and communities are  a common thread that we’ve found has always brought us together. Crossing boundaries of gender, location, race, and culture, they unite us all with an all encompassing goal of creating something of value together. Initially the FOSS movement took root in software development, but over time has grown to be so much more. Open hardware, open government, open science, bio-hacking and maker spaces have all evolved over time from the ideals of the free open source movement. The core of what it stands for grew to embody so many facets of our lives and so many industries and areas of study. It has evolved to be less about hacking on code and instead became a movement.  It has grown from simply applying the principles and tenets of FOSS to development to applying those same concepts to our society as a whole. Our community aspires to build on the footsteps of those before us, and grow our collective knowledge for the betterment of society, and humanity as a whole.  While the world is as divided as it has ever been, in a time plagued with uncertainties, please come join us this year in a celebration of those values.

Who We Are:

GeekBeacon is a non-profit fellowship of geeks that share the open source mentality and gather Geeks and nerdoms of all kinds together. We are a community that regularly runs events: from gaming and streaming to education and learning. We also have a segment of our community named SquirrelArmy that celebrates neurodiversity by providing mental health resources and community outreach.  GeekBeacon was initially created by NixiePixel, a content creator with over 10 years of video production that strived to make Linux approachable. She is also an author on several geek publications, including GeekTyrant and OMGUbuntu, and a former TV host on the Discovery Channel and TechTV.

After having helped with the organization, production and hosting of two large conferences SELF (South East Linux Fest) and OLF (Open Libre Free aka Ohio Linux Fest) we’ve decided it was past time to have our own. This spring, we are launching GBF, Geek Beacon Fest 2022!

Goal

We are hosting this event to show that there are more things that unite us than separate us. We would like to:

• Show how  knowledge and sharing can open up countless possibilities.
• Showcase and share the unique value, as well as the trials and tribulations that many neuro-atypical individuals live with on a daily basis, while thriving as vital members of our society.
• Talk about how science and technology can improve our lives.
• How freely sharing knowledge benefits both individuals, and society as a whole.
• Demonstrate how privacy is still achievable in the modern world.  Tools and patterns that we use.
• How countless OSS projects have time and time again taught us to cherish the value accessibility tooling brings to all users and use cases.
• Demonstrate atypical uses of gaming as a medium, and showcasing how gaming can be used to entertain, as well as educate and provide a venue for social good.